And just for good measure, the Lakers gave the fans their money’s worth Sunday.

Wasn’t that nice of the defending champions, who turned a Game 1 no-doubt-about-it-yawner against the Utah Jazz into a gripping thriller over the final six minutes, giving away a big lead, falling behind by four, than regaining their balance over an angst-filled final four minutes to pull out a 104-99 victory.

The sellout crowd at Staples Center, fast asleep for the first three quarters, came to life at the end, fretful that their heroes were about to drop a shocker, only to hit the exits happy and satisfied after surviving a near-disastrous start to the second round of the Western Conference playoffs.

It was a win-win by all accounts.

The Lakers got the victory, and the fans went home with a good story to tell.

All in all, not a bad way to end an eventful week that began with the Lakers tied, 2-2, with the Oklahoma City Thunder in the first round, only to finish with them standing three victories away from another trip to the Western Conference finals.

If only it was all part of the actual plan.

The last place the Lakers wanted to be against the banged-up Jazz was in a ballgame in doubt in the closing minutes, because the only real danger they face in this series is providing a tenacious, well-coached team any sense of hope, any sort of opening, in the final moments.

That is exactly what they did, fiddling away an eight-point lead when the second unit lost its way over the first five minutes of the fourth quarter.

Just like that, a game the Lakers controlled throughout was actually very much in doubt, all momentum in the hands of the Jazz and Kobe Bryant and the rest of the starters being summoned back into the game to restore order.

And the culprit was the bench, one of the few areas the Lakers don’t have a clear advantage over the Jazz.

It’s been a problem all year, the reserves going through brief periods of good play followed by far too many stretches of inconsistency.

It cost the Lakers the best record in the league over the second half of the season, with Shannon Brown, Jordan Farmar, Sasha Vujacic and Lamar Odom failing to build the necessary cohesiveness to adequately back up the starters.

And it nearly cost them Game 1 against the Jazz.

But it’s something the Lakers have to solve, if not to win this series certainly to successfully defend their NBA title.

Right now, though, there seem to be more questions than answers, and Odom is running out of solutions.

“If I did, I’d be able to put my hands on it, I don’t know, it’s something called synergy,” Odom said. “It’s really not together. “It’s not. We’re not being true to each other.”

As a defending champion, that isn’t the kind of talk you want to hear at this stage of the season.

“We have to do something,” Odom said. “We’ve got to do something because we can’t keep doing what we’ve been doing.”

He’s got that right.

“It starts with a talk to kind of air things out,” Odom said. “I’ll do it; we communicate well with each other. We’ll watch film, be able to go over it, talk a little bit.”

Odom was clearly perturbed by the second unit’s effort Sunday, and he isn’t overstating the problem, considering the Jazz will make the Lakers work for everything they get in this series.

If the bench isn’t up to par, the Jazz will exploit it.

It simply isn’t in a Jerry Sloan-coached team’s DNA to lie down, even against a far more talented team or in a series it will certainly lose barring a colossal meltdown by the champions.

That means the Lakers are going to have to compete every single possession, no matter how big a lead they build or how dire the situation looks from the Jazz perspective.

What upset Odom the most is the bench didn’t do that, and as a result the starters had to be rushed back into the game to regain momentum.

“The way we’re (bench) playing, the starting five can’t get rest,” Odom said. “We can’t hold a lead that they’ve built. That’s not good.

“It’s very disappointing. I’m disappointed in the second unit, the way we played with each other. It’s like when things get tense we kind of separate, kind of go our own way and it’s something I don’t think you can do.”

The good news is the Lakers have Bryant on their side, and he put them on his shoulders down the stretch, pouring in 13 points to help save the day. Odom and Pau Gasol lent helping hands, both making a pair of key buckets and free throws to put it away.

Still, it should have never come to that, not with the Lakers holding nearly every important advantage over the Jazz, from superior size to better health right on down to experience and sheer talent.

This is a series the Lakers should and will win, very likely in a minimal amount of games.

But if the bench doesn’t hold up its end of the bargain, it will go longer than necessary.

“Second unit has to play better,” Bryant said. “Simple as that. And they will.”

At least he hopes so.

“They’ve done a great job in certain parts of the season, but tonight in the third and fourth quarters they didn’t,” Bryant said.

Vincent Bonsignore is an NFL columnist for the Southern California News Group. Having covered the Los Angeles sports scene for more than two decades, Bonsignore has emerged as one of the leading voices on the Los Angeles Rams and Los Angeles Chargers, the NFL and NFL relocation.

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